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An Inside Look at China’s Most Famous Political Prisoner

Kin Cheung/The Associated PressAn advertisement promoting “Liu Xiaobo: A Biography,” by Yu Jie, at the Hong Kong book fair. Mr. Yu’s book has just been published in Chinese.

HONG KONG — Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most famous political prisoner in China, has now served about one-fourth of his 11-year sentence for seeking democratic reforms. The government, at his trial, said Mr. Liu was guilty of “inciting the subversion of state power.”

When one of his comrades in dissent, the provocative essayist Yu Jie, began writing a biography of Mr. Liu a couple years ago, the authorities got wind of it. They hauled him in for interrogation and threatened him with prison if the book was published. Then, to reinforce their message, they put him under house arrest for a time.

The book has just been published — in Chinese, here in Hong Kong — and Mr. Yu now lives in the United States.

He and his family fled China in January because he was being harassed and tortured, Mr. Yu told my colleague Edward Wong soon after arriving in the States. Mr. Yu had begun to truly fear for his life when a Chinese security officer told him, “If the order comes from above, we can dig a pit to bury you alive in half an hour, and no one on earth would know.”

Ian Johnson of The Times’s Beijing bureau recently had a fascinating conversation with Mr. Yu, and the transcript from that interview appears on the blog site of The New York Review of Books. Here are some excerpts from that interview, slightly edited and condensed for space.

Q.

After Liu Xiaobo was arrested, you decided to write the biography. What was your motivation?

A.

I want to explain his ideas. Not many know his work. In the West, if people know anything, they might think of him as conservative. For example, he supported Reagan and, later, George W. Bush’s Iraq war. He was very similar in many ways to the Republicans. I felt I had to write this and explain his thinking and show why he’s like that. Why did he support the Iraq war? You can’t just put him in the European environment and say that everyone who supported that war was a bad person.

Q.

He thought of the war as an extension of his opposition to dictatorships.

A.

Yes, and he wasn’t alone. [Václav] Havel also supported it, and [the former Polish dissident Adam] Michnik, too. So there are very confusing issues and they can’t be simplified. But I want to make him a living person, not a god. Liu Xiaobo had a lot of problems. He had a lot of girlfriends — that’s in the book, too.

Q.

How would you describe his ideas?

A.

He’s similar to [Soviet dissident Andrei] Sakharov. He’s not just a critic of communism but also someone who promotes virtues and values. This is an important point because there are a lot of people who criticize the Communists. Liu Xiaobo also has a constructive ideology, too. That line — “I have no enemies” — is really important. It’s similar to Mandela. You look at how many problems blacks in South Africa had. It could have resulted in a lot of hatred, but Mandela tried to reconcile people, and I see Liu like that, too.

Q.

China doesn’t have apartheid.

A.

No, China doesn’t have the racial component perhaps quite as much, but it has fault lines, for example between country and city. The way that rural laborers are treated in the cities is similar to how blacks were treated in South Africa. If you don’t have an ideology like Liu’s to push for peaceful change, then change could result in violence. For example, I see a big difference between him and Ai Weiwei. Western society is really interested in Ai. A lot of Western media write about Ai and gives him a place of importance. There’s a new movie about him, too. I don’t think he is so important. He is an established artist and he has many theatrical actions that the media like to report about. I do strongly support some of the things he’s done, like the [accounting for the dead in the 2008 Sichuan] earthquake, but a lot of his thoughts have problems.

Q.

Such as?

A.

There’s an example, and here Liu Xiaobo and I are in complete agreement, there was the case of Yang Jia. He killed some police officers in Shanghai. Ai Weiwei thought Yang Jia was a great hero. He really supported him and said it was understandable given what Yang had suffered. But Liu Xiaobo and I were among the few who said this was wrong. Yang had been wronged, but it didn’t justify killing, and the people he had killed weren’t even the ones who had hurt him.

Q.

Maybe China needs different kinds of people. It needs people like Ai to provoke.

A.

Perhaps, but if you’re comparing them, then Liu Xiaobo is much more important. He has a constructive side to his thinking. I think the Western media should report more on Liu and less on people like Ai. They place them on too high a pedestal.